It’s a Friday morning in late March at Caixa Futebol Campus, the training ground and youth academy of Sport Lisboa e Benfica – one of Portugal’s most historic and successful clubs.

Overlooking the calm Rio Tejo, the Campus consists of seven grass pitches, two artificial fields and a 360S facility – an indoor test lab that records player agility and accuracy. There’s also a hall of residence for 65 youth-team members.

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“It is not an easy job for them,” says Nuno Gomes, general manager at Caixa Futebol Campus, nodding at a group of youth players. “But it is their dream, and we are here to help them to achieve their goal of being professional footballers.”

Gomes has lived that dream. As a striker, he debuted in the Primeira Liga aged 18 for Boavista FC, before playing for S.L. Benfica, Italy’s Fiorentina and Blackburn Rovers in the UK. He also represented Portugal’s national side at every level, scoring more than 50 goals.

“The programme here is working,” he says, hinting at Benfica’s 36 domestic league titles. “But we want more. It’s our philosophy to be the club that innovates and be the first club in Portugal to have new technologies. Innovation can help us to always be the number one.”

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This strategy of using technology to gain the advantage is defined by club CEO Domingos Soares de Oliveira.

Domingos Soares de Oliveira, S.L. Benfica's CEO

“Our approach is to find the right talent at the right time,” de Oliveira says. “But we always believe that technology and innovation can help us to perform better.”

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Tiki-taka meets technology

Portugal’s Primeira Liga is small – in scale and economics – when compared with England or Germany’s top leagues. In order to compete with Europe’s big clubs, S.L. Benfica must play smart. This is the basis of de Oliveira’s strategy.

By developing its own star players, S.L. Benfica wins domestic titles and acts as a feeder club for major clubs. This approach is more cost-effective than simply buying talent, and it creates a revenue stream. In the past six years, the Lisbon club has sold 13 big names for a combined total of £270 million.

But the ability to do this relies on youth players developing without injury – which is where the tech comes in. “The challenge today in sports science is to use data modelling to allow us to make better decisions,” de Oliveira says.

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Almost every aspect of a player at Caixa Futebol Campus is monitored: how much they sleep, eat and train; how fast they run, tire or recover; even how they feel mentally. All this is analysed by Benfica LAB under the supervision of Bruno Mendes.

Joao Copeto, chief information officer of S.L. Benfica

As head of Benfica LAB, Mendes helps create the models that take raw player data and use it to optimise match readiness, define personalised training schedules and, importantly, try to prevent injury.

“Using machine learning and predictive analysis, we can learn the facts that lead to success,” he says. “Players can then use these learnings to optimise performance and continually improve.”

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Information enabling insights

“The big advantage we have now is machine learning,” says Joao Copeto, chief information officer, who manages the development of the club’s software and ensures its IT department is integrated with Benfica LAB and all other teams. “Five years ago, we had to use our own data centres and servers to do the computations. Now we use Microsoft Azure, which is very powerful.”

S.L. Benfica has been investing in the space for eight years, with Copeto’s team and Benfica LAB using Microsoft tools to better manage and infer patterns from the data collected at the Campus.

Bruno Mendes, head of Benfica LAB

“Every club is looking for prediction models,” Copeto says. “We have very good models for player stress and for fatigue, but now machine learning can help to explore this even more.”

Microsoft is partnering with sports organisations to supply athletes and teams with advanced and predictive learning models to help them play smarter, get fitter and avoid injury using Microsoft’s Cloud technologies.

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“The future of sports is trending towards data dependence – making it actionable will be key,” says Steve Fox, principal software engineering manager at Microsoft, who works with S.L. Benfica.

Fox’s team has incubated what they’re calling a team and player performance platform that allows Mendes to stream all data types into a single "data lake". Then, by using tools such as Microsoft Azure and Power BI, human performance staff can dig into it, understand more about the athletes and predict their future fitness, recovery and performance levels. This information can also be sliced and visualised to provide personnel with the critical information they need. Being hosted on Microsoft Azure, it’s protected by best-in-class security features.

“Until recently, the players went into the field and it was up to them,” says Gomes. “Now, data is another tool to help us to improve the players and the team.”